Joseph B. Wirthlin Quotes

My sense is that the wonderful technology that we have to visualize the inside of the body often leaves physicians feeling that the exam is a waste of time and so they may shortchange the ritual.

I use a portable pocket ultrasound device instead of a stethoscope to listen to the heart, and I share it with the patient in real time. 'Look at your valve, look at your heart-muscle strength.' So they're looking at it with me. Normally a patient is tested by an ultrasonographer who is not allowed to tell them anything.

For me, the ability to use semiconductor sequencing to provide a medical diagnosis in just a few hours that once took days is a crucial step in saving the lives of patients. This is particularly significant for the treatment of sepsis, where every minute matters.

The doctors x-rayed my head and found nothing.

Keep in mind that if you take a tour through a hospital and look at every machine with on and off switch that is brought into the service of diagnosing the human condition, that machine is based on principles of physics discovered by a physicist in a machine designed by an engineer.

There are things that you can do today that, years ago, there was nothing. The community today needs to know that with MRI and the current medications the view is good.

I've always been very interested in the question of how computation can fundamentally advance the things that we can see. This led me to have a fascination with medical imaging, especially things like MRI and scanning, and eventually computer graphics.

I'm not against high-tech medicine. It has a secure place in the diagnosis and treatment of serious disease.

I had to have tests for cancer and other diseases - it wasn't much fun. I was getting a shooting pain in my hip and we didn't know what it was. First of all we thought it was an old injury. But they didn't find anything wrong, even though when I had an ultrasound test it was all really swollen.

The computer can do a much better job than the human eye, as it is much more systematic in analysing tissues.

Consider radiology. Technology is going to reduce the use of those machines because doctors aren't going to need to send patients two or three times for radiology. They're going to have access to what the previous specialist took. There's also going to be devices that are coming out that are much less costly.

The role of radiologists will evolve from doing perceptual things that could probably be done by a highly trained pigeon to doing far more cognitive things.

Velano Vascular has developed a simple, game-changing innovation that will improve the way medicine has been practiced for decades.

In the Radiation Laboratory we count it a privilege to do everything we can to assist our medical colleagues in the application of these new tools to the problems of human suffering.

I am a medical scientist, not a practical physician. I think it's very upfront. I am a doctor. I have long experience with heart disease.

I was always shocked when I went to the doctor's office and they did my X-ray and didn't find that I had eight more ribs than I should have or that my blood was the color green.

I'm the first to admit that the resolution of a hand feeling the belly doesn't compare with the resolution of a CAT scan scanning the belly, but only my hand can say that it hurts at this spot and not at this spot. Only my hand can say that.

In 1970 I realized that there was negligible risk from x-rays but many radiographs had poor image quality so that the risk from a false negative was significant.

I am sure that I have been much more useful to society as a medical physicist.

You know, I'm a physician. I like to diagnose things. And, you know, I've diagnosed some pretty, pretty significant issues that I think a lot of people resonate with.

I would have loved to have gone into diagnostic medicine.

Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine.

It's the best time ever to be a doctor because you can heal and treat conditions that were untreatable even a few years ago.

The whole imposing edifice of modern medicine is like the celebrated tower of Pisa - slightly off balance.

As any doctor can tell you, the most crucial step toward healing is having the right diagnosis. If the disease is precisely identified, a good resolution is far more likely. Conversely, a bad diagnosis usually means a bad outcome, no matter how skilled the physician.